I can’t even deal with this anymore. It’s too stupid.

The BBC asks from the pulpit:

What does trans mean and why is there a debate about transgender people’s rights?

Gosh, BBC, what fascinating questions. Please explain it all to us.

The UK Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that the definition of a woman in equalities law is based on biological sex.

No, really?! Who knew? We thought it meant armadillo. No, ice cream soda. No, Lithuania. One of those, or something like them. Nothing to do with bibliological sekks.

What is biological sex?

The Supreme Court judgment used a simple definition of biological sex: it is the sex recorded at birth. The court said this is widely used

The Independent breathlessly reports:

Trans people in the UK face a rising tide of discriminatory behaviour and prejudice which is creating a “hostile environment” impeding access to healthcare and damaging mental health, according to a major new report.

But who measures the rise of this tide?

Describing the situation as a “crisis”, in which trans people in the UK are “being catastrophically failed”, Trans Actual UK, an advocacy organisation focused on healthcare and legal protections for trans people, said: “Hundreds of thousands of trans people have seen the degradation of their human rights protections” over the past decade, and are now calling for government action.

Really? What human rights protections are we talking about?

Trans Actual surveyed over 4,000

Oops. Plot twist.

Opinion: This International Women’s Day, let’s uplift the rights and dignity of all women

Sad, isn’t it, that we know that “all” doesn’t mean “all” but “including some who are not women.”

It starts well enough.

International Women’s Day is this Sunday. Every lesson I’ve learned, every battle I’ve been part of, has taught me one truth: when working class women organise, nothing can stop us.

Women make up the majority of the public service workforce, yet you bear the brunt of unsafe staffing levels, low pay, discrimination, and impossible workloads.

But it doesn’t continue well enough.

There are signs of things getting better – the Employment Rights Act is an important step on the road to

I have a good idea, let’s try to climb Chomolungma wearing bathing suits and flip flops. My inspiration is Fox tv personality Pete Hegseth.

Kash Patel baselessly fired an elite team of agents specializing in foreign threats from the Middle East just days before Donald Trump launched an illegal military campaign in Iran.

Patel terminated a dozen employees and staff after accusing them—without providing evidence—of improperly investigating Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The FBI director specifically gutted a group known as CI-12, a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran and its proxies. Days later, Trump toppled Iran’s regime and sparked a sprawling regional conflict in the Middle East.

So, flawless timing. Who

Hegseth says it’s stupid to have rules of engagement. Yeah, man! Let’s bring back war crimes! We miss those! Remember My Lai? We laughed ourselves sick! Pass the doobie!

Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal on Monday of what he called “stupid rules of engagement” in the illegal war against Iran amounted to an invitation for American and allied forces to commit war crimes, human rights organizations and other critics warned.

Hegseth’s remarks came during a press conference alongside the top US general, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine. The Pentagon chief boasted that the US is “unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” “all on our terms with maximum authorities,” unbound by “stupid rules

The funniest thing about this is that it’s not parody.

About Robin

Robin Gow is a poet, educator, and witch. It grew up in rural Pennsylvania and lives with his queer family on unceded Lenape land also called Allentown Pennsylvania.

Quite the medley of deliberate annoyingness in 28 words. There’s the “it”, the instant switch to “his”, the “queer family”, and the obligatory pious smug pretense of giving a shit about forcibly removed native people.

Awarded the Jerry Cain and Scott James Creative Writing Fellow, Gow earned faer MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University where fae also taught as a professor of English.

What is even the point? Other than extra added attention?

Fae is a managing editor The

Never mind.

A councillor who was investigated over a possible breach of Cornwall Council’s code of conduct will face no further action. The council received ten complaints concerning comments Cllr Dulcie Tudor made about trans people.

…

The complaints largely stemmed from a post Cllr Tudor made on social media which said: “Men claiming trans identity are not more vulnerable than women and girls. This is what they claim but it’s simply not true. A woman dies at the hands of a man every three days in this jurisdiction. Nine men who pretend to be women have been murdered in the last ten years in the UK.”

A woman every three days in that one jurisdiction, compared to nine … Read the rest

It’s all in the family.

Melania Trump presided over a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday focusing on children in conflict, one of her signature issues, and acknowledged she was doing so in “challenging times” as the United States has joined Israel in attacking Iran.

Did she acknowledge she was doing so with no apparent qualification or reason?

Melania Trump was the first spouse of a world leader to take the president’s seat at the United Nations’ most powerful body, which is charged with ensuring global peace and security, according to the U.N.

Not the good kind of first. We don’t need spouses of “world leaders” to horn in on Security Council meetings. That’s called nepotism and it’s not … Read the rest

Don’t be shy – just erase women entirely.

Up to my eyes in carer stress, I look online for the services offered by Brighton Carers Hub, only to find that my sex is relegated to something I might prefer to 'self-describe'. This is not 'trans inclusion', this is demoting the sex of the majority of carers to a footnote. pic.twitter.com/byvEmOKdSb

— Helen Saxby (@helensaxby11) March 3, 2026

The only option for women is the one that includes men, so there is no option for women.

And what’s the “Trans” for? What’s the point of checking that? What even is the question? Trans is neither a sex nor a gender, it’s a modifier.

Back to Ontology 101.… Read the rest

Jonathan Larsen tells us:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Great. That means there are way too many military commanders who think … Read the rest

Meanwhile, in the corridors of power…

Trump: "See that nice drape? When that comes down right now you see a very very deep hole, but in about a year and half you're gonna see a very very beautiful building. And there's your entrance to it right there. In fact, it looks so nice I think I'll leave it and save money on… pic.twitter.com/jZXTQ02lib

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2026

The occasion was actually a medal of honor ceremony.… Read the rest

Pink News is ecstatic that women can never have anything just for women now.

Women’s Institute vows to ‘find ways to keep welcoming trans women’ after ban 

WI vows to keep forcing men on women who want to do something without men.

On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court judgement in the case of For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers decided the protected characteristic of “sex” for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act means “biological sex” only and does not include trans people.

In the wake of the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – the UK’s human rights watchdog – drafted interim updates to its Code of Practice on single-sex spaces. 

How dare they? How dare they … Read the rest

Trump to Iran: Ok we fixed that for you, now get on with it, kthxbye.

The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei marked the latest decapitation or defeat of a bitter U.S. adversary overseas, following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq two years later, the breaking of Moammar Gaddafi’s grip on power in Libya in 2011 and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro just two months ago.

The United States has often followed such triumphant moments with attempts to fill the void — deploying thousands of troops, spending billions of dollars, seeking to nurture fledging democracies or, in the case of Venezuela, leaving the decapitated government in power. But those efforts

That’s another thing. Even if you do think it’s worth burbling about idennniny all the time, it doesn’t follow that idennniny=ONE thing about you. The odds are good that there’s more than one thing about you.

We’ve reposted that earlier – he is very clear on the harms and she asks about hurting trans people who think their very identity is being questioned. It’s poor.

— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) February 28, 2026

But even when trans people are being questioned about their very idennniny as trans people, that doesn’t mean their very idennniny itself is being questioned, because there is more to their idennniny than that one thing. Nobody is just one thing. It’s not even physically possible, let … Read the rest

Helen Webberley is economical with her words. She omits a lot of words that would make her meaning clearer.

A mother wrote to me recently, heartbroken. Her ten-year-old transgender daughter had been told, just two weeks before departure, that she could not go on her school trip. The reason given was that she could not share a room with her friends because of new legislation. Her daughter was inconsolable. And her mother wanted to know: how can this happen? What can I do?

We can guess at her meaning because we know something about her, not because she makes it clear. She makes it the opposite of clear. That’s not random. What does she mean “she could not share … Read the rest

Hayley Dixon in the Telegraph on the throttling of an academic who doesn’t subscribe to magic gender beliefs:

The health official behind the pause of the NHS’s puberty blocker trial is blocked from any further involvement amid accusations of bias.

Prof Jacob George is said to have raised concerns over the trial after taking up his role as the chief medical and scientific officer at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) earlier this year. The regulator’s subsequent intervention in the debate led to the Department of Health announcing that the experiment would be paused.

But Prof George is now removed from any further involvement after social media posts emerged of him praising JK Rowling and criticising people for

Again. Same problem. How is awareness of very basic facts “bias”? Surely the denial of very basic facts is a better candidate for accusations of bias.

A health official who reportedly intervened to pause a clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers has been removed from any further involvement due to accusations of bias.

Prof Jacob George, who was appointed chief medical and scientific officer at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in January, raised concerns that led to the Pathways trial being put on hold by the government, according to the Sunday Times.

But the regulator announced on Saturday that George would recuse himself from involvement in the trial after gender-critical social media posts made

Sonia Sodha writes

This row has emerged from one of the most contested issues in medical science today: whether gender-questioning children should be put on an irreversible medical pathway, taking drugs to block puberty and ultimately progressing onto cross-sex hormones. I’ve written about the background to this here: an independent review undertaken by the paediatrician Hilary Cass called an overdue halt to this practice in the NHS. But her review controversially left the door open for a clinical trial of puberty-blocking drugs.

That trial is controversial because many experts (in my view, rightly) think it is impossible to to run an ethical trial of puberty blockers on gender-questioning children. I highly recommend this post from Genspect, and this open

SEEN in journalism points out, and underlines, that what sex people are is not a belief or opinion.

For those catching up on the drama, here’s an overview of what happened last night and this morning (February 27 – 28) with Cathy Newman, Economist Health Editor Natasha Loder, and Professor Jacob George.

At tea-time yesterday Cathy Newman announced on X that she’d seen social media posts from Professor Jacob George, the recently appointed Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the medical regulator the MHRA, and that after they were brought to the attention of the MHRA he was recused (according to Loder, by the MHRA, indicating it wasn’t voluntary) of oversight of the Pathways puberty blocker research.

…

Originally a comment by Steven on A war of choice.

Iran responds by…attacking Saudi Arabia. Makes sense.

It does make sense.

Trump acts like a Mafia boss. He’s boss of the U.S.; now he wants to be capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses). He is demonstrating his ability to remove other capos. He removed Maduro; now he is going after the Iranian leadership. Pick off the ones who defy you and the rest will fall in line. It is the same tactic that he uses to keep Republican legislators obedient to him: he primaries any who aren’t.

But Saudi Arabia is already obedient to Trump. They do him obeisance; they paid the $1B bribe to be on … Read the rest